Yes, that could happen… but, in general, it may change over time. Heather Corinna, the founder and director of sex ed website Scarleteen, told VICE that assuming that people’s attractions will stay static throughout their lives is a bit like thinking that the job you wanted as a five-year-old is the same job you’ll want forever. “Folks who were assigned female at birth might not be as tuned into how their bodies are responding to potential attractions.”
“Our culture doesn't talk about or prioritize teaching folks with vulvas about what arousal and pleasure looks like for them,” they said. McDaniel said the way society discusses sexual attraction has a lot to do with it. Most people aren’t encouraged to start thinking about attraction from a place of, What does a crush feel like to me? Do I have a crush on him? Do I have a crush on her? Girls are simply asked, “Which boy do you have a crush on?” And, if you’re bi, you might actually have bona fide crushes on boys! All of this, along with widely held stereotypes about what queer women look or act like (and what they don’t look or act like) and the predominant narratives around “intense female friendships” ( definitely no homo!!) can make queerness fairly easy to miss. You know, that best friend that you cuddled with all through high school and got weird with when she got a boyfriend? Clues like that.”Ĭompulsory heterosexuality-that is, the idea that we’re straight until proven otherwise-has an enormous role in this, too. “We grow up in a culture that doesn't support exploring a queer identity in the same way it supports exploring a straight identity, it's hard to identify ‘clues’ that might point to attractions to anyone other than cisgender dudes. (For starters, bisexuality simply… exists!) “Coming into your queer identity later in life is completely normal and common,” said Rae McDaniel, a Chicago-based certified sex therapist who works with people who are feeling anxious about a transition they are experiencing in sex, gender, and/or relationships. It’s an extremely real thing, and doesn’t invalidate all of the straight relationships you've had-or will have!-either. So, this is something I didn’t predict! Was I always gay, and I just missed it, or is it a real thing to develop queer feelings later in life? So that’s why, 18 months later-the amount of time my former co-worker/now girlfriend and I have been together, by the way-I’ve decided to simply be the content I wished to see in the world and write this guide to exploring relatively late-breaking queerness. Even when I finally broke down and typed “straight girls” into the Autostraddle search bar and read everything that came up, I couldn’t find quite what I was looking for. Still, I had a lot of questions that I was too embarrassed to ask her (read: all the sex ones). I finally broke down and told my very close friend Sally, who is gay, what was going on, and she was endlessly reassuring-she was the exact right level of thrilled confirmed that it sounded like my crush at least wanted to make out with me and encouraged me to not get too in my own head about labels. If we made out and I didn’t like it, I’d feel terrible… but if we made out and I did like it, I would, at some point or another, have to confess that I had never had sex with a woman before and had no idea what I was doing. I also hated the idea of using another person to “experiment.” I was worried about the possibility of it going somewhere.
That was definitely the case for me-I was really in my head about labels like "queer" and "bi" (how dare I claim to be of a marginalized group when I had no lived experience to show for it?).
Realizing you have queer or bisexual feelings, particularly if you’re an adult over the age of, say, 20, can lead to getting caught in a cycle: I want to explore these feelings so I can figure out how to label myself… but I need to label myself to date/kiss/fuck a real person according to the rules of that label. Part of my confusion was about what this crush even meant about me. I had no idea what to do with this information.